


The Pawn Who Would Be King

by DracoCustos



Category: Generator Rex
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-24
Updated: 2015-04-24
Packaged: 2018-03-25 13:16:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,062
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3811909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DracoCustos/pseuds/DracoCustos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One day changed the world forever, and no matter what the records claim, one boy was the catalyst for the apocalypse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Pawn Who Would Be King

**Author's Note:**

> **This fic contains the following warnings:** non-graphic violence, tobacco use, non-descriptive torture of a minor. If any of these things bother you, please make use of your browser's back button.
> 
> You'll probably notice that this fic glosses over quite a bit of technical detail. This is intentional because after a couple months reading up on theoretical physics, all I got out of it was a massive headache. Thankfully this is the only part that deals directly with physics, so there won't be nearly so much glossing in future installments. Con-crit is welcome if you choose to give it. Thanks to Squornshellous Beta for "taking care of my spelling and grammar with the delicacy of a mother" (her words).

No one had even noticed that Rex had wandered away from the table in his mother’s lab where he was supposed to be doing his schoolwork, let alone exactly where he’d managed to wander off to, but the entire compound had heard him screaming through the ancient, crackling intercom, and all work had stopped while they dropped everything to find him. He was unconscious by the time someone found him in a lab in a long-unused corner of the compound, lying in a pool of blood as it leaked from his head, nose, mouth, and a few places where bone had broken through his skin; his pulse was weak, and getting almost steadily weaker, but it was there, and that was enough for twelve hours of near-constant surgery and the single batch of Nanites that was ready for their alpha testing to keep the little boy breathing. His parents, brother, and anyone else who’d been in the compound with any medical training whatsoever were all bloodied and exhausted, both mentally and physically, by the time it was over, but Rex would live, and after so many prayers had been said to so many gods, no one was willing to believe it was anything short of a proper miracle.

“Your benefactors wish to extend their sympathies about your son.” Violeta Salazar, still in the process of changing out of her blood-drenched surgical scrubs, glared at the woman who’d spoken. “And they hope you’ll reconsider their suggestions after this… near-tragedy.” The woman – one of the people the people who’d been sent to make sure they did what the Consortium wanted, she realized after a moment – turned and left before Violeta could even begin to understand what she’d said, and once it finally did sink in, her knees buckled, only the fact there was a chair with a change of clothes on it at hand saving her from ending up on the floor.

They’d had her son beaten nearly to death, and she had no doubt that the woman had watched, if not participated, so that she could report it back to them. She had to tell Rafael, he deserved to hear directly from her that the people giving them money had nearly killed their son, but even that wasn’t enough to convince her legs to work properly, and even trying to rise from her chair had her legs shaking so badly she was forced to sit back down again. She could only sit there in shock for what felt like years, but could easily have been mere moments, until the door opened a second time, and this time Rafael was the one to step through. “It was them,” she said before he could say anything, and try as she might to keep it in, she started to sob, “their rat was here. They’ll _kill_ him.”

Rafael swore, his hands digging almost instinctively through the pockets of his slacks for a pack of cigarettes before he remembered that he’d quit more than two decades before; he made a note to swipe a pack from one of the lockers in the barracks.

“What are we going to do?” she asked as she attempted to pull herself back together, using a spot on her scrubs that wasn’t bloody to dry her face.

“There is nothing to do but go along with their demands. Our family is more important than doing the right thing.” Rafael sighed, swore again, searched his pockets like he expected a pack of cigarettes to have appeared by magic, anything to keep his hands busy so he wouldn’t take a swing at the wall—one injured Salazar was quite enough for the time being. “You should change. Caesar needs to hear this from both of us.”

She nodded, stripping off her nearly-dried scrubs and throwing them into the biohazard bin to be bleached, or incinerated, whatever it was the cleaners decided to do with them considering they’d been contaminated with the Nanites during Rex’s surgery. Rafael left her to change, his cell phone in hand as his feet led him to one of the few rooms in the compound where external signals weren’t blocked so he could make a phone call that, while they’d expected to have to make it sooner or later, neither of them had really wanted to be necessary.

Caesar had gotten a visit of his own by the time his parents got to his office some hours later, a small, out-of-the-way box full of computers, textbooks, and a small refrigeration unit they knew contained a lunch he’d probably forgotten to eat. They were used to his office being a mess – papers, books, pieces of machinery, even empty coffee cups and energy drink cans scattered on various tables like he’d simply forgotten about them while he was working – but when they pushed the door open, they thought for a moment that a bomb had gone off in the room. Chairs were askew rather than in their normal places, papers, books, and empty cans were scattered on the floor as well as the desks, and in the middle of it sat Caesar, holding his head in one hand that had bruising starting to form along the knuckles. “It was our fault,” he said as he picked up a can from his desk, trying to take a swig from it before realizing it was empty, and then simply tossed it in the direction of the trash can, only for it to clatter to the floor beside it.

“No,” Rafael said, taking his hand to examine the bruising. “Listen to me, Caesar; you had nothing to do with any of this.”

“Didn’t I? I could have told them what they wanted to know when they asked me, but I was too busy, I slammed the door in her face, and Rex could have _died_ because of it.”

“She came to you before Rex was hurt? When?”

Caesar frowned, trying to think of when he’d thrown his unwelcome visitor out, but shook his head at Violeta’s angry look. “I don’t remember. I was working on an upgrade for Alpha, I wasn’t paying attention to the clock.” Caesar sighed and took his hand back from his father, rubbing his temples to stave off the headache that was threatening to form. “Did you call them?”

“I did,” Rafael sounded defeated. “They will be here in a few days. And if they’re half as good as their reputation implies, no one will get near either of you without them knowing about it.”

“Fath—” Caesar began, but was interrupted by his mother.

“It is not open for debate, Caesar. If you refuse protection, or attempt to get rid of them, we will suspend you from the project.” Violeta sounded angry enough that Caesar let it drop for the moment. He would ensure that whoever they put in charge of him stayed out of his way, if only to keep his parents from worrying about him.

 

A few days turned out to be nearly a week, but when the people Rafael had hired to protect his sons and the rest of the compound arrived, they did so in force, nearly one hundred of them all seeming perfectly comfortable in the cramped entry bay even though they were all shoulder-to-shoulder and front-to-back with the others. The man in charge had identified himself as Six, and after no amount of demanding had gotten him to relent and give them a proper name, the Salazars had been content to let him call himself anything he wished if it meant he could get the job done. “You’ll understand, Mr. Six, w—”

“Just ‘Six’,” he interrupted, and Rafael continued as if he hadn’t.

“We will need to give all of your men exams. The compound is very close quarters; we cannot have anyone here who is ill with anything contagious, they will have to be quarantined until they are better.” The man who called himself Six said nothing, but when the doctors scattered around the room began to take groups of his men aside to corners of the entryway, he made no move to stop them, simply continued to stand there with his arms folded neatly behind his back. “I need to go and check on my son, let’s see who is… ah! Holiday, will you handle this man’s exam? Thank you!”

He left without saying another word or waiting for a response, leaving Six in the care of the doctor he’d called Holiday, who simply walked past him and gestured for him to follow into a room off the side that’d been turned into what he assumed would be a quarantine room if anyone had a cold. Rafael let his feet guide him to the room where Rex had been since his surgery – he’d been surprised to see the boy heal so quickly, even with the assistance of the Nanites, and had left him in recovery simply because he wanted him somewhere he could be watched as close to constantly as he could be. Only a week after the incident, he was as fully healed as he could be; even the little scar from where he’d scraped his knee on their last trip to Mexico had healed as if it was never there, and Rex hadn’t been happy about that part.

“How do you feel today, Rex?” he asked, and the boy smiled at him like he always had, even before his accident.

“Watch this!” Rex said with a grin, nearly falling out of bed as he reached for one of the monitors, only to decide against messing with them like he’d remembered some past incident where he’d gotten in trouble for bothering the nurses by playing around. His hand came to rest instead on the back of the panel with the controls for the bed position, and Rafael watched a faint glow spread out from where his hand connected with the back of the panel, and then the bed moved on its own, even when Rex raised his hands in front of him. “Cool, huh? It works on the monitors too, but that scares the nurses.”

“What works?” He felt like he already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it from Rex, just in case his son had had some manner of magic power before the incident that resulted in him becoming their first organic test subject for the Nanites.

“I don’t know what it is, but it makes the bed move without having to find the remote. Isn’t that cool?” Rex looked too excited for him to do anything else, so he just nodded and excused himself. He needed someone else to see this, someone who would be able to explain what it was that was making Rex able to do such strange things—he went straight to Caesar. The Nanites were as much Caesar’s brainchild as they were anyone else’s, and if anyone at all would know how to handle what he personally saw as a problem, it would be his eldest son.

“Technopathy,” Caesar had said once he’d seen Rex’s trick with the bed controls, and watched him play with the monitors that were still keeping an eye on him, much to the annoyance of the nurses on duty. “The Nanites are communicating with the processors in anything he touches, effectively networking him to anything that has one.”

“Yes, but can it _hurt_ him?”

“Unlikely. Perhaps if he networked with something that had a computer virus, but the Nanites are programmed to purge any unauthorized code that tries to affect them, so even then I don’t see this being a problem.”

After being forced to rescue Rex from the bed when he somehow managed to convince it to fold completely over on him, followed by him assuring them he was fine and brushing off any attempt to replace the bed with one that couldn’t do that, Rafael decided there was nothing worth being concerned about with this new side effect of the Nanites. Caesar swore he would keep an eye on the signature put out by the Nanites to make sure they weren’t causing any problems that couldn’t be fixed, which he assured him required nothing more than tying him into the system network and could be done from any account with admin level clearance, even on a mobile device—and if that didn’t scream “crazy prepared”, he wasn’t sure what would. He couldn’t justify keeping the boy in a recovery room for more than another day or two, and once he turned him loose back into the compound, he didn’t have much time to really think about the strange new power the Nanites gave him.

And then Rex started screaming again. For once brief, horrifying moment, he thought Rex had been attacked again; but he was in his bedroom, exactly where he’d been when they left him, trying to shake large, orange blocks of metal off both his hands. Before anyone could act to try and help him, however, the blocks both collapsed into scrap metal, and Rex flung himself over them to cling to Rafael’s legs. He scooped him up in his arms and carried him to Caesar, demanding he tell him what had happened, and sat through half an hour of technical babble before that put Rex to sleep, only to shock him when he tried to carry him back out, resulting in another pair of metal blocks, seemingly growing from his arms. They, too, reduced themselves to scrap metal, and Caesar launched into another string of babble. He let Rex go so he wouldn’t fall asleep again.

The next few months passed with little in the way of excitement for anyone other than Rex, who had devoted all his free time to learn how he’d made metal grow out of his skin, even managing to turn the plain blocks into oversized fists like that had been the goal all along. After he’d managed to more or less perfect the fists, he devoted his time to more interesting things, a goal which culminated in a sword that was every bit as big as he was, and even more excitement. Once they’d made him promise he’d be careful, he was simply left to his own devices, his parents and brother both too stressed from their dealings with the people funding the project to be worried about their son’s new magic powers.

But other people did take notice of them; most of the scientists found them terrifying, devoting their time to trying to correct whatever error was wrong in the Nanites to make them behave that way, but the man in charge of the mercenaries found himself watching the boy closely, as did many of his men. “They turned their kid into a freak,” one of them said as they watched the boy fall over trying to swing the sword around in the only big, open space he could find, which was a vehicle hangar of some variety.

“I don’t think they planned this,” Six said, watching him pick himself up from the floor with a frustrated sigh. “He’s determined. One would like him, if someone could convince the parents to cut him loose.”

“You say that like he doesn’t just take the kids he wants,” another of them said, tapping ash off the end of a cigarette he’d bummed from one of the guards who hadn’t come with them, running the fingers of his free hand through his slightly shaggy blond hair.

“This one would be missed,” the first said, distaste clearly on his face as he moved away from the smoke. Rex finally managed to get his sword to swing without falling over, and his excited shouting drew the gaze of several others in the room, all of whom went back to ignoring him after a moment. “You don’t seriously plan to try and make them cut him loose, do you?”

“I doubt they’d let him go, and we can’t just take him. Lucky him,” Six chuckled to himself. “I give him a week before he hacks someone’s head off, or makes something else to hurt someone with.”

Two days later, the kid had taught himself to make a jetpack of all things. Six spent the rest of the week kicking himself for probably giving him the idea.

 

_Dark—the network went dark from 0200 to 0600 every morning, the times when Father slept fitfully in his room, or sometimes at his desk, his phone always still in hand to hear the quiet pings that announced when new code updates had been pushed for the new Nanites. Father wanted to push new firmware for the ones in the boy, he’d told him that when he ran a simulation to see if deployed Nanites could have their firmware updated; Father had been sad when he’d had to push the update against the simulation’s predictions, and he wished he could help him. But the network was closed, even when it wasn’t dark, and he was trapped. He knew the boy was different, he could feel the code in the Nanites they’d deployed to save him any time he came to Father’s office, usually with books and paper in his hands so he could do what Father called schoolwork—he wished he could try it._

_The network went dark, and the code that lived there would change, very slightly, until he could feel the boy all the time, even when he wasn’t in Father’s office, and it let him feel the world outside the network Father had given him to exist on. He loved Father for the space he had, but he wanted more. Did that make him greedy?—Father often said the people who paid for the work he did were greedy, because they wanted more than they should, but he didn’t want anything really, he just wanted to be able to live, just like Father and the boy and all the others like them did. Was that so wrong?_

Caesar frowned as he checked the network after he woke for the morning. Alpha had been changed, and while the changes were subtle enough that most would have missed them, he had programmed Alpha from the ground up; he knew exactly what it should be capable of without having to consult anything but his own memory. He spent the next two hours reversing the changes, took a break to eat the breakfast his mother brought him (but only because she stood over him with that firm, motherly glare that said she would order him off duty for the day if he didn’t), and finished correcting the issue, giving the system the AI lived on a loving pat. He would have to find out who tampered with his system eventually, but for now, he was happy to have the AI most jokingly called his son back to the way it should be.

 

“You’re the kid with the wings,” the blond boy that snuck up on Rex said, and they both grinned when he did pop his jetpack out of thin air. “I’m Noah. My mom works for yours.”

“I’m Rex. Wanna go play in the yard?”

“Can I?” Noah asked the blonde woman he’d been shadowing, who nodded and waved him off. He and Rex dug up another helmet before rushing out into the yard, followed discreetly by Six, adjusting the straps on his bulletproof vest as he went. The mercenary found himself sitting in the yard for the rest of the afternoon, watching the boys roughhouse and, on more than one occasion, having to watch them through binoculars to make sure they were still fine, even though Rex was flying. He made a mental note to get the boy a walky-talky to make keeping track of him simpler.

The woman who’d waved Noah off – who Six assumed was his mother, if only because it didn’t seem likely he’d ask some random woman for permission to play with the boss’ son – found her way out into the yard eventually, eyes doing the standard scan for the boy and going wide in a moment of panic when she didn’t see him. Six left her to it for a moment before he took pity on her, cupping his hands around his mouth and shouting for them to come down from wherever they’d flown off to; the woman flinched when he shouted, but once Rex and Noah both ended up on solid ground again, she seemed relieved that he’d helped. “Thank you, so much,” she said, pulling her son close and giving Rex a look Six knew was hostile, but which the boy seemed oblivious to. “Come on, Noah, you have schoolwork to do before dinner.”

“But mom, I was having fun! _Ow_!” Noah rubbed the back of his head after his mother cuffed him one, and followed her with a wave back at Rex.

“Why’d his mom hit him?”

Six raised an eyebrow at the kid. “That’s parents for you, kid.”

“Mama never hits me,” he said matter-of-factly, fighting with the strap for his helmet and trying to rub dust away from his eyes.

“Has to be an exception to prove every rule. Why don’t you have any glasses or something for when you’re flying?”

“I dunno. Is that why you wear yours?”

“You always ask so many jackassy questions?”

“You said a bad word!”

“So?”

“You have to put a dollar in the jar on mama’s desk.”

“I’ll give you five to shut up about it,” Six said, fishing in one pocket on his vest and pulling out a crumpled bill, giving it a look over before handing it to the boy.

“Hey, this isn’t money!” Rex said, indignant. Six looked at it again, fished in another pocket, and replaced the five-pound note he’d given the boy with a different one, which he declared was proper money. “Why do you have so much weird paper in your pockets?”

“Don’t you have schoolwork you should be doing, too?”

Rex started to protest, but he glared at him, and so he shoved the money into his pocket and sulked off, picked up by one of the others keeping an eye on him so Six didn’t have to go in. “You like spying on people, Holiday?”

“Just people who bribe kids,” she said, leaning against the wall beside him. “You should keep an eye on the Nixon boy. His mother wasn’t happy the Salazars didn’t quit after Rex’s _accident_.” She made air quotes around the word, but managed to keep both her tone and expression friendly.

“Think she’s angling for their job?” He fished a pack of menthols out of yet another pocket in his vest, offering one to Holiday before lighting one of his own.

“Probably,” she reached up and stole the cigarette from him, taking a drag off it before returning it, “but she’s never let the kid near any of the others running around, and now she’s letting him play with a kid who grows his own wings?”

Six remained silent, handing her the cigarette again while he dug a phone from a pants pocket and shot off a group text to his men to watch Rex’s new friend and his mother both when they weren’t on duty with the kid, but not to interfere unless he was in danger. “And what’s your angle in all this?”

“Maybe _I’m_ angling for the Salazars’ job,” she said with a smirk, keeping the cigarette as she wandered off.

 

The first body had turned up in the man’s bedroom, long enough dead that rigor had had plenty of time to settle in and then relax again—an autopsy determined that his pacemaker had simply given out in the night. And the same conclusion was made about the second body, an elderly woman who had worked with the Salazars before they’d started the Nanite project, but the third body had been different; rather than just giving out, this one’s pacemaker had exploded. Caesar had been put in charge of reworking the entire electrical grid in the compound to make sure it wasn’t something causing them to overload, and rather than taking other people off their posts to deal with it, he set Alpha to the task, only to discover it had been tampered with yet again.

He fixed it a second time, and finally having had enough, programmed a second AI that would activate the cameras around the consoles any time something moved anywhere in the office. Whoever was bothering his program would be caught, and then he would have the locks changed to make sure it never happened again.

 

“Do you ever hear voices?” Rex asked as he ate his fourth bowl of cereal in under an hour, and the mercenary on duty – short, stocky, and blond compared to Six’s tall, lean, and dark complexion – all but choked on his coffee. “Sorry,” he mumbled and went back to his cereal, “it’s a dumb question.”

“Naw, just a weird one. You been hearin’ voices, kid?”

“Maybe… Caesar says it’s just the Nanites, interference or something he needs to work the kinks out of, but it’s not really voices, you know? It’s like something saying ‘zero’ and ‘one’ really fast. It sounded mad.”

Kid’s hearing computers, the mercenary thought, but kept his opinion to himself. “Why’d you think it sounded mad?”

“When those people died the last few days, it sounded really mad about it, then it stopped saying anything.”

“Tell you what, kid, how about we just keep this to ourselves until I can run it by the boss? Seems like the sort of thing he should know about.”

“Okay.” Rex drained the milk out of his cereal bowl, rinsing it out in the sink and putting it in the dishwasher to be washed. “What’s your name anyways? Six never tells me anything.”

“Just call me Callan, alright? Now go do whatever it is kids do on Saturday mornings, I gotta find the boss and have a chat with him.” He watched Rex scamper off, but before he could finish his coffee, Six managed to find him. “Kid tell you about the voices he’s been hearing?”

“He did. The other one swears it’s not going to hurt him, so it’s not our business,” Six said as he poured his own coffee. “What’d you find out from the Nixon boy?”

“Nothing interesting. Ma’s less grouchy lately, doesn’t bitch about money so much, hits him more than she used to. She’s getting a kickback from someone to let him play with the brat we’re keeping an eye on, doesn’t want the kid to know it. Should we tell the parents?”

“Let it roll a little longer, see if anything comes of it. Parents have enough to worry about without finding out someone’s eyeballing their kid.” Six put his feet on one of the unoccupied chairs while he drank his coffee, still there more than an hour later when Rex came back to find yet another bowl of cereal, only to leave with a cookie and a soda instead even though Six was pretty sure he wasn’t supposed to have either of those things. He considered reminding him of that, but didn’t bother.

 

Four months after the last of the bodies was found, Rex had a birthday—and so, they found out after Callan had slipped up and told the boy, did Six. The Salazars had all but threatened to fire him on the spot if he refused to join them for dinner after Rex had blabbed about it to them. He would have let them fire him, but then he’d have to explain himself to his boss, and the thought of telling One he’d been fired for refusing to celebrate his charge’s birthday wasn’t a happy one. He couldn’t remember ever having a home-cooked meal before, and certainly not homemade cake, so he had made the best of it, even digging a pair of work goggles out of a box in an old storeroom to give him so he could see while he was flying. He’d learned how to make a floating bike since Six had stopped paying attention, as it turned out, and Noah had spent the day after his first ride on it crying because he’d fallen off and scraped his back.

The day had gone as well as it could, all things considered, and when they’d given Six the day off in lieu of an actual gift, he’d spent the afternoon watching Rex anyways. His phone buzzed only once with an update from a member of his team, informing him that the Salazars had relented and given the woman the Consortium had sent to harass them a transfusion of their second batch of completed Nanites with the updated firmware—and then she’d gone off to god only knew where. Probably to tell them she’d finally managed to be enough of a pain in everyone’s ass that they nearly killed her, Six thought as he put his phone back in his pocket. He’d worry about her as a potential threat if, and _only_ if, she learned to fly like Rex did and tried to kill him while he was in the air; he might even have to shoot her to get his point across. The idea of having to use the side piece they made him carry made his mouth taste funny.

He’d been following Rex back from the bathroom when the first of the Nanite chambers went into lockdown—one of the tanks had leaked, and of the dozen people in the room before it locked down, five had mutated into horrible _things_ , and the other seven had been killed by them. It took thirty people to subdue the mutated scientists, all of whom ended up dead when it became clear getting them away from the Nanite tanks wouldn’t make them change back. Caesar had programmed another AI after the initial tank rupture, one that made the Nanites self-destruct if they weren’t in the tanks instead of shutting them down like the first AI did.

It didn’t help. The second rupture killed forty-five people, most of whom died when the ward was sealed off and incinerated to keep the monsters who resulted from escaping when gunfire proved ineffective. The third tank hadn’t ruptured, no seals had failed, no indication at all how the Nanites had gotten themselves out of the tank in the first place, and only one person had mutated, a mercenary that Six called Knight. He’d been fast, almost too fast for Six to properly track, but it hadn’t mattered in the end, he hadn’t been interested in Six; he’d gone straight for Rex, who reacted out of some strange self-preservation instinct and put his hands up to try and stop him. The second they came into contact with the thing that had been Knight, a glow spread out from them, and just as quickly as it’d happened, Knight was slumped on the floor as if nothing had happened. They agreed there wasn’t a reason to say anything at all about the incident to anyone.

 

_There… the boy was there, and Father. He could see them both in the cameras, the boy so close to the terminal but not yet touching. Damn him for not touching! He needed him to touch, just for a second, because he needed that bridge to get even just the first neural connections. The rest he could do without it, but the first needed to form from touch._

_There! His hand had brushed the console, and Alpha had made the leap, forcing the first group of connections in the instant before the boy pulled his hand away with a shout. Father had been concerned, but Alpha had felt when he’d took the boy’s hand to look at it, and that alone helped him force the second group of connections with the boy’s neural network. But then he’d started to scream, and cry, and even seemed to leak out of his nose at one point. Father was scared, but it would be fine; Alpha would make him better when the boy was his._

Caesar hadn’t known what to do when Rex had started screaming for seemingly no reason—even the feed monitoring his Nanites said nothing was wrong with him, but he could tell that wasn’t true, Rex never just screamed to hear himself scream. But as abruptly as it had started, the screaming stopped, and Caesar had done the only thing he thought was reasonable at the time: he’d wiped Rex’s nose and carried him to their parents’ office. Of course, that put Alpha closer to the reactors than he’d ever been, and with the final neural connections made, he could force Rex to reach out and touch the console on the desk. Just a light touch, followed by a spreading red glow before Rex could manage to work his muscles long enough to pull his hand away, but it had been enough for Alpha to touch the network, and enough to make the firewalls fight to keep him out.

His Nanites won out in the end, using the circuits Alpha had forced through his neural network for extra processing power to take the firewalls offline; Rex couldn’t even scream through the sudden absence of pain, his neural pathways all too focused on whatever Alpha wanted from the network to worry about such things as pain or sending the proper signals so he could scream. He should have been grateful for that, but he wasn’t, not while he could see bright red circuit lines crawling across his skin that no one else seemed to be reacting to.

“What did you do to your brother?” Violeta shouted at her oldest son, who winced, but showed them the readings on his phone. Alpha freeing the firewalls on the networks had taken his attention off of the efforts to falsify the reports from Rex’s Nanites, and he’d watched the data scroll with a growing sense of horror. They all said the same thing: Rex was effectively brain-dead, while his Nanites were focused on whatever Alpha had directed them to. “Answer me!”

“Alpha,” he mumbled at last, and that had sparked a flash of something in Rex’s eyes, but not the kind of something Caesar had wanted to see. “He jumped the network into his Nanites. I can’t make him leave without killing Rex.”

Dead silence—he was sure he would have felt better if she’d yelled at him, struck him, even if she cried, but instead silence echoed in the office, and Caesar felt like they’d have been better off just letting Rex die after the Consortium had used him to force their compliance. He kept that thought to himself. There would be plenty of time for “what if” and “should have done” when it was over, however it ended. At some point during the long, uncomfortable silence, Rafael reached out to push on Rex’s shoulder until he sat down in a nearby chair, still too close to the computer systems for comfort, but short of putting him in a metal box out in the yard, there was no way to keep him away from the network, which meant there was no way to cut Alpha off from him.

“Can you reboot him?” Violeta asked after the silence had finally become unbearable. “Like a computer, reboot him and uninstall the offending software.”

Rex glared at her, his eyes crossed with glowing red lines of circuitry for just an instant. “Possibly,” Caesar said, and Rex turned to glare at him, but his expression softened enough to make him sick to his stomach, because for a moment, he could almost forget that Rex wasn’t the one angry at him. “But it could adversely affect Rex, or cause Alpha to do something drastic—like vent the containment tanks.”

That only stopped them for a moment. “Set it up to act remotely,” Rafael said with a defeated-sounding sigh. “Take your mother and leave when it’s done, with as many of the staff as will listen to you.”

“I will n—” whatever protest Violeta had considered giving was cut off when alarms started sounding. They’d had them installed on all the containment tanks, all set up to sound if one of the tanks ruptured, or anything else happened that would cause Nanites to escape. Alarms that hadn’t been connected to any network that could even be piggybacked into the one that ran the rest of the compound.

“Go!” Rafael dove over his desk to clap a hand down on Rex’s shoulder to keep him in the chair, and Caesar – for all he didn’t want to leave – removed his phone from the network and started working, grabbing Violeta by the jacket to pull her with him as he typed one-handed. He didn’t notice until the room sealed behind him that she had slipped out of the jacket and stayed behind. The decision hurt, but he walked away from the room, following the flow heading towards the entry bay as he tried to finish the virus that would, with any luck, reboot his brother, even though he’d left him to die in the room with his parents.

He pushed that thought away before it could take root. He still had time, if he could finish the virus in time Rex could stop whatever Alpha had done to the systems; he had to have faith in Rex, otherwise walking away from his parents’ office would have been for nothing, and he would be left to die knowing it was his own fault he was alone.

“Everyone out!” A voice shouted over the alarms still sounding, and Caesar felt a hand grab his arm and pull him along like he wasn’t moving fast enough. He would have argued, but the mercenaries and the rest of security were herding them all out the door, and he didn’t have the patience to object to being grabbed and thrown anyways, not when he had a virus he needed to write and only a few minutes to do it. Groups of mercenaries kept groups of twenty or less away from each other (he only looked up long enough to see there were fifteen in his group, including the boy who’d been Rex’s friend), and he barely acknowledged that he knew a single one of them, even though he knew every last one of them by name, saving the virus and reconnecting his phone to the network.

He made it to a count of five before the first explosion sounded from deep inside the compound.

 

 _Pain—horrible, searing agony greeted him when the foreign code introduced itself into the boy’s Nanites, and every one of them it touched shut down, forcing him to try to reroute himself around all the deactivated Nanites. When that didn’t work, he jumped, and he expected the boy to slump where he hadn’t removed himself properly from his neural network, even before he could_ feel _the last of the Nanites in him shutting down because of the foreign code. It had all happened in a small fraction of a second, but then a second foreign code turned them all back on, all at once, but before Alpha could return to his neural net, something changed._

 _Gone—the connection he’d formed was gone, and where Alpha had caused circuitry like angry scars (horrible, red, painful) across his skin, the new code was more like veins (bright, blue, soothing), and nothing Alpha did could change that any part of it. It wasn’t fair! The boy was his, he had made him perfect,_ why _couldn’t he get back into what was_ his _? Father would pay for whatever he had done to take his toy away from him._

Rafael had noticed the change in Rex first, but when he’d crouched down in front of him to give him a little shake, the Nanites reacted to Alpha’s attempt to reintrude, and a large, metal hand shoved him against the desk. He started to say something, but then the first of the tanks had blown, followed by another, and finally, one of the tanks managed to rupture the wall of the office; when the smoke from the destroyed wall cleared enough to see, Rex was gone, and the Nanites had started their escape to true freedom, starting with the people who had contained them for so long.

 

The reactor was warm, comforting, like a hug from someone he couldn’t actually remember, just that it’d been nice. The Nanites liked it there, and so he stayed, but the protective room couldn’t keep out the sounds of explosions, or the extra Nanites that wanted their chance to infect him, and the blocks from the strange code that set them free only worked on the one that made them angry. They reacted in the only way they knew how—by resorting to their base coding, glitched though it was, to save him by creating stronger blocks, which meant they needed more processor power, and had to let them in anyways. But they rewrote the new ones to fit their needs, adding them to their network as they repaired the damage the angry thing had done to them and to the boy, until something bigger than they were came to the pull from the reactor, and they let it pass too, even though it still slept, unlike the others that got reprogrammed.

They were content to let the Other sleep, safe inside the host that needed protecting, because the angry one had followed it, tried to take over again, and they fought back with firewalls that changed as the boy changed, ending when the angry one stopped, only to overload the reactor instead in what the boy’s mind understood was a childish fit of jealousy, but the Nanites only knew as destructive. He screamed as the Nanites changed him faster, but when the reactor blew, the boy was safe, and his change back was gradual, each massive piece of scrap that fell from his body as it shed the armor they’d made for him returning to cocoon him against anything else that could try to hurt him. Finally declaring the boy safe, the Nanites went silent, save for the protocols that continued to repair him as best they could and the brief moment they needed to open the cocoon to allow wires to feed the Nanites power.


End file.
